"Let's do this, Alice."
Then, the monster parted its jaws wide and spat.
The stream came out as a pressurized ribbon of stolen river, orange-white and dense enough that the toxic haze combusted on contact and left a tunnel of superheated nothing in its wake.
Kaiden's body was already moving sideways when the shadow caught it.
Vespera had sealed a mask of braided shadow over her lower face against the Mire's air, the same solution Kaiden's blood mask served from the other end of the family toolkit. Her shadows intercepted the torrent six meters from his chest in a braided wall that split the magma into two arcing sprays, cooking the ground spores off the floor wherever the splash landed.
She did not wait for the stream to finish. Her lattice drove past her own deflection and into the glutton's bloated torso from four angles, barbed shadows punching into cherry-red hide that had been stretched drum-tight by the volume of river packed inside it.
